Monday, December 24, 2012

Web Hosting Tips to Improve Your SEO

When it comes to SEO, most webmaster's concerns revolve around creating effective in-bound links and high quality and authoritative content. All these features are important for a successful SEO campaign. however without having an optimal web hosting service provider all these efforts become null and void. In essence, your choice of a web hosting company can actually break or make your SEO and Internet marketing initiatives. Some of the web- hosting tips that can help improve your SEO initiatives include.

1. Administrative Panel

An important starting point when choosing a web hosting service should be on the features and quality of its administrative panel. An administrative panel is basically a control panel with multiple features and tools developed to promote SEO. Great web-hosting services come with an administrative panel that formats the sites code to appeal to SEO bots, consequently improving site rank.
In addition, administrative panels offer open source content management tools and features that seamlessly integrate with external search engine optimization applications. It is recommended that the web hosting service of choice should come with features that automatically insert title tags and meta tags on each website page. Additionally, SEO web applications that are compatible with the administrative panel can be easily downloaded to automate your SEO strategy. For instance, you can install web applications that allow you to simultaneously post your website content to social bookmarking platforms. This has the effect of generating valuable in-bound links that inevitably increase your page rankings.

2. Shared vs Single Hosting Services

Most website hosting provider's offer shared web hosting services that allow a multitude of users with unique domain names to feature on a single IP address, while still sharing the same bandwidth and data storage space. Hosting services that attach single domains to an IP address are more effective for SEO purposes. This is because search engines algorithms, such as Google, factor in page loading speeds and site performance when assigning page ranking. Nevertheless this feature is more important to ecommerce sites and domains that require huge data storage space to accommodate their multimedia features. On the other hand, sharing an IP address that hosts spammer websites can have a negative effect on your SEO campaign. The effects are more adverse especially in instances where your website shares an IP address with numerous spammer or non-legitimate sites.

3. Server Reliability

A web hosting with a server that frequently experiences downtime can have disastrous effects to you SEO campaign. During downtime periods, potential site visitors are hampered from accessing your site - similar situation occurs for search engine bots. It is important to note that in case server downtime occurs occasionally, it may have limited effect on your site ranking. However, in instances where search engine bots repeatedly experience site downtime, your search engine rankings are bound to drop significantly since your site is viewed as unreliable.

4. Geographical Location of Hosting Company's Servers

As earlier pointed out, the domain assigned by your web hosting company is attached to an IP address. An IP address indicates the location of the FTP hosting server. For instance, if your web hosting provider server is located in England, Google will assume that your website caters primarily to England's Internet users. Nevertheless other factors, such as language utilized on the site, have an influence on how Google prioritizes search engine results based on location. On the other hand this problem can be easily solved by optimizing your content with geo-tags. Geo tagging involves the process of inserting your web content with geographical keywords.

Conclusion

When it comes to SEO campaigns, the choice of your web hosting service provider determines your success rate. Nevertheless, web hosting SEO services should complement other external SEO strategies, for instance content optimization, not override them. All in all, the benefits of web hosting service to a webmaster when it comes to SEO should never be underestimated.

Erik Gaandt is a freelance tech writer and SEO enthusiast. He understands the importance web hosting has on a sites search engine rank. He enjoys sharing his insights on various blogs. If you would like to find out what host a site is using, you can use the WhoIsHostingThis.com search engine, visit the website to learn more.